Dreaming of life on Mars in Miami, I consider the effects it might have on American painting. Black Gods from Outer Space affect the inner space of a few artists I am friendly with in New York, yet the psychotropic rove that is Dade County presents a cosmic cathexis in formidable districts. Gallery Diet contains and expands upon a mutual investment of a community inquiry into the movement from observation to perception. From the false stasis and sway of a palm-treed reality to the erotic storm sustaining impossibility as form and vibes. The mind moves under the fluorescents of modular white cubes. Van Hanos guest curates the group show Astral Weeks, where alienated painting, sculpture, photography and film graft and splice and craft in space unidentifiable, deliriant, beautiful.

Allegations and anomalies present themselves in each of the works on view: terrestrial subjectivities as obscenities orbit the room in ineffable marvelous color. Confronted on one’s immediate left, almost too close to the bolted front door, as if it were trying to abstract itself onto the street, is Chad Scoville’s The Aftermath Of The Surveillance State, 2012. A painting, but only in the sense of it being like a virtual ayahuasca laser-jet void set in a frame just to fuck with you. The MIT Malibu-campus codes and stroboscopic symbols drenched in neon digital waves push you into the room to see like a sky-writing pilot asleep at the wheel, the soft explosions of dreams in a free language. Breyer/Genesis P-Orridge continue to disrupt identity slash grammar and any other value that stimulates death in the quadrant psychedelia of two materially enhanced prisms. Shamanic memories or futurist prosthesis, Fisionet, 2003, and Untitled, 2009, circumcise the hype and stick out, shines. Nearby, Rory Parks shades, a cluster of paintings, basically, bridges and calendars, emptiness stretching out so that nothing is left, not even leaving. How close is boredom to leisure? How close is leisure to peace? How close peace is to the pragmatic horror of right now. A kind of silence, like long walks through a ghetto, dissolves or emerges from a canvas and it is important like botany or science. Corinne Jones’ painting Eight Thirty-Two, 2012, and Liz Deschenes silver-toned photogram Photograph #22, 2004, both lush out this erasure in their spectral precision. Similar DNA strains decorate the trans-cellular pictography of Nicolas Lobo’s primitive print Ethnographic Sound Blanket, 2012. It is clear that believing in other realms is essential to be an artist, but Lobo’s mysteries modernize clarity into a cursory vision. Technotribality also smudges its presence in Keltie Ferris’s painting =)))>>, 2012. A fabulous empathy pulses in her force field.

In theory and homage, the centerpiece of this renegade aeronautics and space administration slash exhibition is Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, 1990. It is a psychic heart that spiritually outflows into South Florida for six weeks as if a slow-motion Apollo launch took place inside a coffin. Courtesy of the Sackner Archive, this work transcends. It spawns.

Further reading on the lysergic listlessness of this sweet summer show comes from artist Rory Parks, his essay “Notes on Non-Diagetic Light as it characterizes Diagetic Light" is excellent and can be reached by contacting Gallery Diet’s Nina Johnson.